Panic Over Bird Flu

I am a engineer, scientist and statistician.

We are panicking unnecessarily over bird flu.

That is not that we shouldn’t take precautions, create stock-piles of Tamiflu, have contingency plans for what to do if the virus mutates and have indoor storage for outdoor birds. But we should still eat properly-cooked eggs and chickens, as if we don’t we’ll heap more misery on our poor farmers.

But so far the virus has not mutated as it did in 1918. Incidentally Aspirin was a pretty good antidote to the flu as it lowered temperature, so linked with other modern medicines, the deaths would not be as bad as then. If it does mutate, it will do so in a country like Vietnam or Turkey, where people are not informed and they live intimately with their birds.

If the mutated deadly virus did get to the United Kingdom how many deaths would we accept?

At present it has only killed dozens of people around the world.

Compare that with the 1,600 people who die every week because they smoke.

We are panicking about the wrong target, yet again!